Curatorial Research Collective, Mass Support: Flexibility and Resident Agency in Housing, Spitzer School of Architecture, New York, Spring 2023.

ARC3302H S
Instructor: Simon Rabyniuk

In the early 1990s, Aldo Rossi, speaking to 600 architecture students in Venice, stated that if you want to know how to build, you need to work at a firm, and if you want to be an architect, you need to write a book. With this distinction, he asserted that architects construct discourse about architecture and urbanism, understood here as public discussions through writing. Seemingly a radical claim, Rossi’s provocation followed a long-held belief that architects make ideas. Given the rapid expansion of architecture institutions beginning in the 1980s, his emphasis on the book might seem limited. Since that time, architects have engaged a wider range of forums and media for linking their architectural intelligence, matters of concern, and distinct publics. In this expanded field, architectural exhibitions hold an important place.

Architectural exhibitions are generative events that are either reflective or projective. Reflective exhibitions investigate the conditions of architectural production, while projective exhibitions test ways of changing those conditions. Reflective exhibitions historicize the societal boundaries of the discipline, the nature of design labor, the materiality and technologies of building, and how these ideas and actions are received within our shared world. Similarly, projective exhibitions span aesthetics, technics, and politics; rather than using the architectural archive, they incorporate design research. This may include the display of new processes, scenarios, or institutions. Given the in-progress nature of these efforts, these exhibitions often feel like rehearsals for a future that hasn't yet arrived and may never. Through architectural exhibitions, architects reappraise architecture's past and test its futures, shaping both the discipline and the wider public's perception of it. This makes the subject worthy of greater understanding.

This seminar introduces students to the theories and practices of exhibiting architecture through an applied investigation. Students will contribute to a collective project focused on a shared topic to be discussed in the first class. A tentative organizing theme is "refusing infrastructure," suggesting architects' participation in broader civic movements to counter big, useless, and imposed projects. Through the collective project, students will gain experience identifying, assessing, and collecting evidence, critically interpreting it, and testing approaches to spatializing narratives. This work will connect traditional academic skills with spatial and graphic design.